3 Steps To Promote Clickbank Products with Your Blog

Clickbank is a secure online retail outlet for more than 12,000 digital product vendors and 100,000 active affiliate marketers. A Clickbank product is simply any product (generally eBooks) that are sold through Clickbank’s unique system.

3 Steps To Properly Promote A Clickbank Product Via Your Blog

After launching my Facebook Ads Guide on Clickbank, I have sold a ton of copies and learned a LOT about how the Clickbank-sphere works.

It’s interesting how the affiliates differ so much between Clickbank and an affiliate network for example. It’s been a great learning experience and I want to share some of that with you today.

In the past I have promoted many Clickbank products via my blog and never realized three huge problems that are especially true when you promote “make money online” products via Clickbank. Although, these problems extend to all niches on Clickbank, not just “make money online.”

It wasn’t until I was on the “vendor” side of the clickbank products that I could see exactly what was happening on the affiliate side. This lead me to discover three ways to promote your Clickbank product on your blog more effectively.

I’ll first go over the problems and the wrong way that people promote a Clickbank product via their blog. Don’t make these mistakes!

Problem 1: People Purchase Via Their Own Affiliate Links

When you promote a Clickbank product, it’s extremely easy for someone to simply sign up for Clickbank as an affiliate, essentially refer themselves, and buy the product at a hugely discounted rate because they get the affiliate commission.

It’s pretty crazy actually… the numbers are as 10%-15%+ or more. When big affiliates and email lists would send out a promotion for my product, many of the sales would come in from them, but about 10% of the orders (over and above the normal) would be people using their own affiliate link.

I mostly assume they are using their own affiliate link as there is no way to tell. But many people have their name in the Clickbank username, making it very easy to assume.

This is a big problem. Just think what an extra 10% of sales could do to your revenue! If you made 10 sales… you might now make an extra one sale. 100 sales, an extra 10, and so on. This might now sound like a lot, but when you’re talking products with 50%-75% commission, you are looking at as much as $60+ per purchase!

Problem 2: All Positive Reviews

It’s easy for us bloggers to want to try to earn as much commission as possible from promoting a product on our blog by only telling our readers how great and amazing it is.

I’ve done this many times in the past.

Every review was a 5/5 star, every review was positive, everything was great… While I still made sales, I discovered this is not the best way to write reviews for Clickbank products.

Problem 3: Forget To Actually Review The Material

It’s unfortunate to say that there is a LOT of crap on the internet. Many digital products are worthless at best. It’s easy to fall prey to the marketing message that a Clickbank product offers without actually looking at the “meat” behind it. You really can’t write a good review unless you have actually looked at the material yourself!

Solution #1 – Include Bonuses Of Your Own

The best solution to overcome affiliates buying via their own affiliate link seems to be by offering a bonus of some sort. The more value in your bonus, the less likely it is someone will still purchase using their affiliate link. These don’t have to be physical products or anything crazy. Just something that would be of value to those purchasing the Clickbank product.

The interview was really a simple word document (converted into a PDF… because people feel like PDF’s are more valuable). It outlined all the good points that the owner of Plenty of Fish told me when it comes to advertising on his site.

By offering this simple bonus, I was able to get a good number of affiliate commissions. I still get them to this day. Simple but very effective.

The next example is when I offered a bonus for Local Lead Plan, a complete guide to localized internet marketing. This time, I offered a secret method that I personally had used to get clients for my local lead business. Again, a simple PDF… 2 pages long. It worked really well.

The bottom line is you will ALWAYS lose out on sales due to people purchasing through their own link… there really is nothing you can do except add value and get SOME of those people to decide to buy through you instead. The other benefit to doing this is that people will naturally start to check on your blog about a product before buying it to see what little extra bonus they can get! This will mean more money in your pocket over time.

How To Offer A Bonus

To offer the bonus, simply include at the bottom of your blog post that the people who purchase through your link will get X bonus. All they need to do is forward their clickbank receipt to your email and you can verify they purchased via your link, etc that way.

Solution #2 – Write Something Negative…?

I’ve found that the best converting clickbank reviews are the ones that include something negative about the product. You don’t have to flat out say… “Oh I hate this about it.” But having some sort of wish list or what the product is missing is a great way to show the readers what the product HAS and still give an honest, trust worthy feeling in the review.

A recent study by American Express shows us that consumers actually seek out negative opinions on a product more than anything before deciding to purchase.

I believe because so much of the product reviews are all positive… that they just want to know WHAT IS THE DOWNSIDE? Including this could mean more sales for you. KaChing!

Solution #3 – Review The Material

This seems simple enough. Actually review the products that you want to review. I can hear many of you saying… “But, I can’t afford to buy all those products!” Thankfully, many times, you won’t have to! I know when I launched my Facebook Advertising Guide, I would give free review copies away to bloggers that had any sort of following in a niche that was similar to the “Make Money Online” niche. That’s right… I’d give away my $116 course for free just because they were going to review it.

In fact, if you simply contact the support of the products you’re wanting to review, you can more often than not get a free copy or discount so you can give the best review possible.

So there you have it. Now it’s time to go make some Clickbank cash!

This article was written by Jonathan Volk. A full time blogger, speaker, affiliate marketer, and online entrepreneur. I’ve written about him before here, here, and here. Check out his blog for tips on internet marketing and how to make money online.

I’ve definitely noticed a lot of affliliate bloggers (including John) handing out extra incentives for buying through their link. Whether its free review on their site, a document, or some other incentive, I can definitely see how that would make people want to buy more.

Hi Jonathan and thanks for a very useful article. I think the bonus idea is good but should not be overdone. When, as a potential buyer of a product, I see an enormous bonus package I get a little wary because usually the quality is not that good but when it is dressed up with attractive icons and good copy it can be too “good” to resist.

Let’s face it – most bonus material remains, taking up space on your hard drive while you get into the product you just bought. I think it important to offer a small bonus package of high quality.

Step away from the “make money online” market and bonuses aren’t needed. In some cases I’ve found they reduce sales, I’m assuming because people think that if you’ve got to provide an incentive to buy a product/service then is it really that good in the first place? There’s also the small matter that there are still LOTS of people out there who don’t know what an affiliate is, saying “hi, buy through my link and I’ll give you this” is a great way of advertising that you’re only promoting the product for a commission.

There is a big old crazy world out there away from the internet marketing, diet scams, teeth whitening niches, full of people looking for real things to buy, genuine services to use and authentic information they’d gladly pay for.

I always forget my CB ID – so when I sign up for affiliate stuff I always have to look it up. I kinda wish they had a bar like amazon does – where I just click and it populates a link for me with my ID.

True, but still, if you are a good affiliate, you can save a ton of money by buying via your own link or even game the system by buying on behalf of others. I really think Clickbank has to re-think this problem a bit, SY

I don’t understand why “heaps of people” would hate you for writing a negative review but I think you’re missing the point. If you write a totally negative review you are unlikely to sell anything at all. The idea is not to write a totally negative review but to display some integrity by admitting, for instance, that a certain aspect of what you are selling could be improved.

BTW this would apply when selling a product as an affiliate. You would hardly be prepared to say anything negative about your own brainchild.

Re Point 1. If you stop trying to sell internet marketing junk then you don’t need bonuses because your prospective audience isn’t aware of what an affiliate is, never mind going to the trouble of setting up an account to buy through their own link. There are some very good products on ClickBank but I don’t think I’ve ever found one that was about making money online.

Thanks for the great information as always. I agree that the affiliate “personal purchase” can be an issue. I wish that there was a way around it, but on the plus side that is a sale I might not have made at all.

I don’t know if people realize it, but there was a little mistake on the article, and probably people won’t care about it. There are two number 2 problem. The third problem was missing somewhere. But there was no.3 solution, LOL

Great tips! I’ve always seen people giving great review for the product while hiding some of the products weakness. It would more interesting if were able to see honest review about the product that we are going to buy compare by having all the great review alone. Plus, it would increase the after buy good review of the product and will increase the sales too.

Perhaps your reason #3 is why so many affiliates bought through their own link. Think the way cb works is you have to have at least 3 purchases go to someone outside of your zipcode before funds are released, so it isn’t like someone could make a history of buying through their own aff link unless they were getting really creative. Even if they do, it’s more money than you had before.

I use the tool I bought to promote my clickbank products and I’m gettint great results…But I had to paid for it, not much, but it wasn’t free…So any way, the first time I use it i got great response and made more than double my money back..check it out in action: You might need to copy and paste the link

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